DEATH OF A SALESMAN @ CURTAIN CALL THEATRE, 10/31/10

by Michael Eck
Sepcial to The Times Union
LATHAM – “Death of a Salesman” is a powerful, terrible play. It remains as brutal as it did upon its premiere in 1949, and somehow its exposure of dark side of the American Dream seems even more potent in this tumultuous election season.
The work is currently onstage at Curtain Call Theatre, in a mightily impressive production directed by Steve Fletcher. Fletcher has assembled a worthy cast of lead and supporting players and a crack design team, and all elements come together in this rendition, which makes good on Miller’s tragic tale.
In the past, Curtain Call has made an effort to offer hard-hitting, socially-conscious selections amidst seat-filling farces and comedies, but this production is a real feather in the company’s cap.
Even before the play begins, Greg Mitchell’s set — monitored by a profusion of old, cloudy window panes, hanging in free space — sends a sort of shiver. A coffin shaped piece of highway adds to the lingering dread.
Phil Rice, as Willy Loman, steps down along the yellow lines and everything begins to fall part — everything meaning the pieces of his life, not this play.
From the first beat the audience is entranced.
Joan Coombs — who recently starred in Miller’s “All My Sons” at Hubbard Hall — serves as an anchor amidst the chaos, machismo and stunning dysfunction of the Loman family. Her Linda — wife, mother and enabler — is sweet but not removed from the endless web of lies and boasts that keep the family afloat on a sea of imagined progress.
Rich Lounello and Isaac Newberry play sons Biff and Happy, and they, too, deeply inhabit their characters in distinctly, and ironically, unhappy ways.
Rice comes on at first like a force of nature, as Miller intends. In what is quite possibly the finest acting work he’s done on an area stage, Rice then shreds the character into a babbling, lost soul. In some instances it’s almost frightening. The most troubling part is that every adult in the room will find a piece of their father and a piece of themselves in Rice’s relentless portrayal.
A scene in which Willy gets caught in a bad situation by Biff is particularly charged, with Rice, Lounello and CCT producer Carol Max creating a taut, emotionally fractured atmosphere.
Fletcher makes the entire play claustrophobic, using Mitchell’s set (And Greg Goff’s comparable lighting) to create new locales that seem to topple all over each other. For all the movement in his salesman’s life, Fletcher emphasizes, Loman has gone nowhere.
“Salesman,” as the title implies, is not a chipper piece of work. It would be easy, in our bleak economic climate, and with fall tightening its grip on daylight and mercury, to avoid an entertainment as dark as Miller’s, but a great play is its own reward, especially in a production this well-conceived.
Recommended.

One Response

I personally saw this play, and cannot say enough about how powerful and edge-of the chair exciting it is. It will remind you of a person, place or time in your life that IS going to open your mind’s eye to memories of your past.